Anne Richie

Venture partner, JumpStart

Five Things

Sweet spot: She typically works with companies with between $5 million and $50 million in annual revenue.

Strange motivation: She likes riding her bike through Cleveland streets full of old factories. "I appreciate that history. It's motivating."

Young photographer: She's enjoyed taking pictures since age 7.

Recommended reading: "The History of Black Business in America" by Juliet E. K. Walker

More hobbies on the way: She'll become an empty nester a year from now. By then she says she "might have 50 hobbies."

Anne Richie spent most of her career working for banks, but she's never made a loan.

Instead, she worked with companies that had trouble paying them back.

Oddly enough, it didn't stress her out — she enjoyed crawling into the trenches with struggling business owners and helping them fix tough problems. It also proved to be great training for her current job.

Since August 2016, Richie has worked as a venture partner at JumpStart in Cleveland.

Though the nonprofit is best known for working with local startups, Richie works with established companies, which pay a fee for JumpStart's assistance.

She hunts for coachable business owners running companies with growth potential, then she connects them with whomever can help them best. Sometimes it's a colleague at JumpStart. Sometimes it's a vendor JumpStart has worked with in the past. But if they need help with finance or growth strategy, she'll often work with them herself.

Unlike her old clients, the companies she works with today tend to be reasonably healthy. But the skills she developed as a loan workout officer can benefit them nonetheless.

After all, she has spent a lot of time asking rigorous questions, using financial statements to pinpoint problems and helping business owners hunt for creative solutions.

The Beachwood resident said she's always been a numbers person, but she realizes that many of the business owners she works with — through JumpStart or through the financial courses she teaches through the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program at Cuyahoga Community College — weren't born with that predisposition.

So she tells them to think about numbers a little bit differently.

"Don't get scared about the numbers and the math. Think about the story the numbers tell about the business," she said.

Richie is particularly good at helping people understand complex, abstract ideas, according to Patrice Blakemore, business adviser for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program. Blakemore knows from experience, having sat in on some of Richie's classes at Tri-C.

"Every time I'm in her class I learn something new," she said.

Today, Richie often finds herself working with minority and female business owners. However, when she was a banker — she previously worked for Bank of Boston, Citicorp, KeyBank and The Home Savings & Loan Co. of Youngstown — the owners were usually white men. She was almost always the only black woman in the room.

But those surface differences melted away quickly once they got to work. They knew that she was genuinely trying to help them during a time when they badly needed help, Richie said. — Chuck Soder

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